Talk:Ship/@comment-2.99.238.158-20130225194629/@comment-165.112.121.110-20151008124923
The best counter to someone who spams glass cannon at you is to arm for defense and just a few weapons. Before Disharmony, I used to love it when my enemy spammed glass cannon, because I usually got a lot of battleships that I would load with heavy well-rounded defenses and some kinetics. Usually the enemy never lasted to the melee phase and that’s when they’d have to change their tact to a more balanced strategy. Unless it’s the AI, and then the AI rarely ever changes its strategy and just gets obliterated by my fleet. In Disharmony, you have several options against glass cannons. You can do as I did before: make heavy defense fleets with a few weapons, as their glass cannons won’t have defenses, so it takes barely a couple of any weapon type to easily melt them in the first phase while you can resist their barrage. This is your safest option usually as you can survive fights without losing a single ship if the enemy spread fires or attempts a guillotine. If they nose break, you might lose only one ship, max. Meanwhile the rest of your fleet is sitting pretty. Only problem is that your fleet, stacked for mostly defense with only a few weapons or bombers, will be likely not be great against a more balanced opponent as your weapons won’t damage them enough to punch through. This leads to your second option… If your enemy has a mix of glass cannons and balanced ships, you can take another approach. One thing you can do is gather a few ‘tank’ ships (about 1/3 of your fleet) loaded with defenses and mix them with your own lightly-armored/ high damage ships. Then set your formation so that the tanks are up front and your high dpser’s are in the back. Arm your tanks with a few squadrons of bombers. This will easily counter a fleet of glass cannons, though you may still lose some ships depending on if your enemy chooses to spread fire or nose break. -It’s important that the first ship in your formation is always the heaviest defended it can possibly be in case your enemy goes for a nose breaker, as nose breaker means they’ll focus their entire fleet on the first ship in your formation. If you have a decent dreadnaught or battleship stacked for defense and armor, they might survive it. -If your enemy chooses to spread fire, you’re probably going to lose your back dpser’s to the overwhelming fire. However, your dps ships will have killed at least an equal amount in return and your fighters/bombers and the big forward tanks will mop up the rest. Meanwhile, you keep your own ships always on spread fire. Their glass cannons will melt as they didn’t build for defense. This formation is great as it can be employed not just against glass cannons, but against balanced and defensive fleets as you are using high dps ships of your own. You’re just protecting them behind a wall of defensive forward ships. It’s a common strategy and quite effective.